SYDNEY (Reuters) -Thousands gathered across Australia and New Zealand on Friday for Anzac Day, a public holiday commemorating military service members who fought and died during wartime.
Anzac Day originally marked the nations’ role in an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to capture the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey during World War One, which resulted in 130,000 deaths on both sides of the conflict.
In a key episode on April 25, 1915, thousands of troops from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) took part in an ill-fated amphibious invasion by British Empire forces on the area’s narrow beaches.
Today, Anzac Day honours all Australian and New Zealand troops who have served in conflict.
“It is now a century and a decade since the first Anzacs climbed into their boats and rowed into history,” centre-left Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who paused election campaigning for the day, said in a statement. “The years come and go, and still we come together to honour them and all who have followed.”
One of the largest services marking the day, a public holiday in both nations, was held at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra where more than 26,000 attended. Services in state capitals Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide and Hobart also drew crowds.
The Melbourne event was marred by booing from some in the crowd during an Indigenous Welcome To Country ceremony, behaviour that Albanese labelled as an act of “cowardice on a day when we honour courage and sacrifice”.
A prominent neo-Nazi was escorted from the event by police, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Overseas, memorials were held at Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey, which has long drawn visitors from Australia and New Zealand, as well as at sites of wartime significance in France, Thailand, Papua New Guinea and Malaysia.
Peter Dutton, leader of the conservative National-Liberal coalition, Albanese’s main opponent in Australia’s May 3 general election, said Friday’s services “pay tribute to the more than 103,000 Australians who made the ultimate sacrifice for our nation”.
“There was valour in every act of service,” Dutton said on social media platform X.
In New Zealand, which contributed about one in six troops to the Gallipoli campaign, memorials also took place, including a large service at the country’s war memorial in the capital, Wellington.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, at Gallipoli for Anzac Day, said he had visited battlefields and cemeteries in the area where around 2,800 New Zealanders died during the failed campaign.
“Nothing in my life has been quite as humbling and moving as walking in the footsteps of the ANZACs,” Luxon said on X.
(Reporting by Sam McKeith in Sydney; Editing by Cynthia Osterman, Shri Navaratnam, Philippa Fletcher)
